Best 335 quotes in «sympathy quotes» category

Every time you victimized someone,” I said, “you were victimizing yourself. Every act of kindness you’ve done, you’ve done to yourself. Every happy and sad moment ever experienced by any human was, or will be, experienced by you.

Feeling sorry for our bodies ought to be the closest we get to feeling sorry for ourselves.

Feeling leads to understanding, understanding leads to sympathizing, sympathizing leads to action, and with action, we can change the world. - Maya Dehlin

Females and boys are the only creatures that propose others for friendship. As for the rest of us, friendship sort of just happens.

FIGARO. The guiltiest have the hardest hearts. ’Twas ever thus.

For a while this seemed to do the trick, and I felt that whatever contamination I had helped to spread, the boundaries I had helped to break, sprinkling flakes of myself all over the surface of New York like so much fish food, had been forgiven.

For those constantly full of joy, they sometimes feel a little guilty for always feeling so good. That guilt is compassion: it flies in with an attempt to share one's joy with others who do not have it.

For the first time I began to perceive that true sympathy cannot be switched on and off like an electric current, that anyone that identifies himself with the fate of another is robbed to some extent of his own freedom.

George's hand lifted and fell away again. It seemed an insult to imply that anything so small as a touch could stop the raw feeling in Sir Stephen's suddenly dark and haunted eyes.

From watching Silvia, I'd learned that one of the worst things about being ill is that most people find your suffering opaque. With this sadness it was different. I felt that I needed to nurture and protect it from people's understanding. I wanted Susy's sympathy because I wanted comfort and to feel less alone, and yet I also didn't want it—I didn't want my personal grief to be part of something universal right then.

Government is not moved by sympathy. It is moved by ingenuity.

Half the point in reading novels and seeing plays and films is to exercise the faculty of sympathy with our own kind, so often obliterated in the multifarious controls and compulsions of actual social existence.

He told me things about himself that should have made him sound urbane but did the opposite. He told me, for example, that he liked Steve Reich's music, modern-art museums, and Beat poetry. These words flew out of his mouth and went boomeranging back as if they knew they weren't meant to take the conversation anywhere but back to him. He also explained that he really liked interacting with different kinds of people. When I didn't immediately respond to this, he repeated it, and so I assured him I believed it.

Have you ever tried to organise a threesome in real life?' I shook my head. I'd only encountered them in porn, but it seemed to happen without much admin, the same way all porn skipped out the granular details of sex, like condoms and kissing, that were supposed to happen in real life.

He felt that if he could get deep down in himself quickly enough, he would be okay, but sympathy might drive him mad.

He kept telling and I kept repeating “I Know” sometimes people doesn’t need answers, they just need you to hear them what they say, make them that they are heard, Vijay was like that, he doesn’t need any one sympathizing to him, he just needed people to listen to him.

He told his friends that if they really wanted to help him, they would treat him not with sympathy but with visits, phone calls, a sharing of their problems - the way they had always.. because Morrie had always been a wonderful listener.

I also found it hard to accept the Mizuko I'd known in multiple miniatures was one physical person. I suppose it would feel the same waking up in bed with Jesus or Father Christmas, or any long-dead figurehead of an ancient cult. You know every word of every doctrine off by heart and then you see their toenails, gums, and vertebrae, not in pieces but all held together, and it's hard not to lose your shit.

I asked to use the bathroom and sat, recovering, on the edge of a marble bath on a dais—the kind Greek husbands are slain in.

I am noticing a big difference in the way the hospital workers are looking at me as I approach Jess’s room. The look of sincere sympathy that used to be on their faces when they made eye contact with me is gone. It has been replaced by shear helplessness as they quickly walk past me with their heads tilted down and to the right. I feel like Bud Fox walking into his office with the Securities and Exchange Commission awaiting him.

I bask in that sympathy because it's nice to have somebody who cares, even if it's the wrong person for the wrong reasons.

I became convinced that I was being watched. Because self was still leaking everywhere, a part of me began to think it was Mizuko rather than a stranger. I hoped that there might still be a reunion. I hoped it in the shy, sly way hope comes out of the jar, the mistranslated box, last—after everything and everyone else has escaped.

I began to cry but maintained my shouting through it, like a wind through sheets of rain.

I beg you, alight and join your sorrow with mine: misfortune wanders everywhere, and settles now upon one and now upon another.

I cannot live my life striving only for my own security, I can only feel secure when I see myself useful in other people's life.

I can feel for anyone that is unjustly treated...and I can feel for those that injure them too.

I can’t look people in the eye and tell them that they’re going to die anymore.

I can’t hate him. All I feel is sympathy for the devil who has crawled inside my heart, stealing my soul and my will from me.

I can't talk about my childhood at all, because cannot say "I" when I mean "we," and if I say "we" it leads to a conversation about how I have a dead sister, instead of what I want to talk about. I found that out in the summer. So I don't talk about it.

I couldn't decide what kind of person she was, whether she was one of those insects that look exactly like wasps but aren't . . . I just wanted to know if she would sting.

I couldn't think of a reply except No, so I said, 'Sure.

I do not believe it possible for one to genuinely love Truth more than people (or vice versa). One might fall into the snare of loving the search more than people, or the pride of having exposed something or someone, but not the truth itself. For if you love Truth you love people; because to love people at all and without illusion, you must also love the truth about them.

I don't know, I can't know, but I almost did.

I don't want to alarm anyone, but everywhere we go I see Alec Baldwin. It's like he's following us.

I even felt a touch of sympathy for the difficulties he had faced in his life, however stupid and repulsive the shape of that life might appear to me.

I felt ashamed for having judged him so harshly without knowing the real boy. His one offense against me―goaded by Charlie’s bullying character―was easy to forgive.

If a person's mind is controlled by forces of revenge and jealousy, it cannot express love & sympathy. And even if they show love and sympathy to others it will yield no good result. The thought will not be reflected in love but in hate.

If art does not enlarge men's sympathies, it does nothing morally.

I felt the nauseous shiver in my stomach—everything from rage to empathy to morning sickness—that I had grown used to and now thought of as being love.

I felt my own self-sufficiency, my own Walden Pond, seeping out of me as if I'd sprung a leak. Self soaked into everything around me—the floor, the walls, the one window, the grass. The words on the page.

If we are genuinely concerned about engaging young people, particularly those that are vulnerable or at risk, we must listen to them properly.

If everything stays the same, it seems possible for someone to come back.

I found it hard to write the bits where the things that were at first surprising or even shocking became normal incrementally until I couldn't see that they were anything but normal, because everything else had shifted just one centimetre here and one centimetre there, moving at the speed fingernails grow, until finally everything just clicked into exactly the wrong place.

If you read a book set in Kars and put me in it, I'd like to tell your readers not to believe anything you say about me, anything you say about any of us. No one could understand us from so far away." "But not one believes in that way what he reads in a novel," I said. "Oh, yes, they do," he cried. "If only to see themselves as wise and superior and humanistic, they need to think of us as sweet and funny, and convince themselves that they sympathize with the way we are and even love us. But if you would put in what I've just said, at least your readers will keep a little room for doubt in their minds.

I hope when this is done I'll be able to get back into my happy gardening vibe that was so healthy for me. I want to go back to my routine and my morning ritual with the compost, but it will probably be that my life will split in two. New Leaf Gardening in Wood Green will be happening in parallel to a fantasy that runs along the bottom of that screen like a ticker. Alice will be fine. Rabbit will stay up tonight, and every night. Resending and resending, reopening the page to see if she has responded, if anyone has. The spinning wheel will make my eyes hurt and everything else will go dark.

If you're looking for sympathy you'll find it between shit and syphilis in the dictionary.

If you truly have compassion in your heart, show it by keeping your doubts to yourself and sharing your hope with those who love change!

Ignorance may be bliss, but only if it outweighs curiosity. Curiosity is a gateway drug to sympathy.

I had shelved expectations of another kiss; the intensity of not kissing now worked almost as well—the proximity and denial.

[January 1944] As to this country, I have been lecturing now for three years to the troops and their attitude is the same. They don’t believe in concentration camps, they don’t believe in the starved children of Greece, in the shot hostages of France, in the mass-graves of Poland; they have never heard of Lidice, Treblinka or Belzec; you can convince them for an hour, then they shake themselves, their mental self-defence begins to work and in a week the shrug of incredulity has returned like a reflex temporarily weakened by a shock. Clearly all this is becoming a mania with me and my like. Clearly we must suffer from some morbid obsession, whereas the others are healthy and normal. But the characteristic symptom of maniacs is that they lose contact with reality and live in a phantasy world. So perhaps it is the other way around: perhaps it is we, the screamers, who react in a sound and healthy way to the reality which surrounds us, whereas you are the neurotic, who totter about in a screamed phantasy world because you lack the faculty to face the facts! Were it not so, this war would have been avoided, and those murdered within sight of your daydreaming eyes would still be alive!